Yes He Can...Hell No He Didn't!

In what he hoped would be seen as a thoughtful, statesman-like, intelligent speech delivered in Constitution Hall in the City of Brotherly Love Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) sought to extricate himself from the octopus of militant Black racism that is threatening to squeeze the jizz out of his post-racial Presidential campaign. Pity he had to throw his white grandma to the wolves in the process. Collateral damage, I suppose. Well, that's one of the reasons he's against the Iraq war.

Madelyn Dunham with her husband Stanley raised Barack when his hippyesque mother abandoned him for Indonesia and a new husband when the little tyke was ten. His Kenyan father did a bunk years before in pursuit of an Ivy League doctorate. Madelyn, now in her mid-eighties, stood by him providing him with a supportive family, a good home, health care and an excellent education, in fact all those things which form the bedrock of his own campaign. She wiped his nose, plastered his scrapes and kissed his bruises, guided him through the difficult teenage years at a time in her life when she would surely have welcomed a wee respite from child rearing. She loved him as a mother, "sacrificed again and again for me," he says, and Barack, apparently, loved her back. That was before he ran for President of course.

There was however a serpent in the Garden all the while. Madelyn, who not only raised this forsaken little black boy but also reared his mother, a woman who made two inter-racial marriages, was herself a racist. We have her eloquent grandson's word for it. His grandma, you see, the Senator tells us, "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street..." One wonders what exactly she said. Maybe she turned to the gangly grandkid and confessed "[t]here is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

No, wait, it wasn't Madelyn Dunham who said that, it was Jesse Jackson, famed Civil Rights leader, confidant of Martin Luther King, and former Democratic Presidential contender and himself a black man. For further revelations concerning the redoubtable Jesse's excursions into - gasp! - racial profiling we will, no doubt, have to await a Presidential campaign by one of his grandchildren. Obama, driving the knife in further, also insists that his granny made him "cringe" by uttering "on more than one occasion...racial or ethnic stereotypes". He does not elaborate and, unless home movie clips surface on Youtube in the future, we are left to fill in the blanks as luridly as our imaginations will allow. Maybe she asserted that Blacks were spreading AIDS in order to wipe out homosexuals, a section of the population of which they are not avowedly very fond? Or that Asians were unfairly using their manifest predilection for higher mathematics to keep white boys out of MIT? Or that those Latinos are real good at mowing lawns and making beds?

Who knows? Who cares! If cringe-making remarks by the elderly relatives of up-and-coming Liberal Ivy League smart-arses are to become fodder for Presidential campaigns God help us all.



"Oh stop that now, Grandma.
You're making me cringe."




But this is Obama, the Great, the Good (may his Middle Name be ever blessed yet ever mute!), the Most High Prophet of national unity and racial redemption, the Usherer-In of a new era of peace and harmony, the presumptive Presider-Over of a new joyous global order of justice and prosperity for all. And there he stands before a hushed, expectant world trashing his poor old granny for all he's worth.

At least when ol' Bill got caught with his Presidential rowdydowdow where no married rowdydowdow should be, Presidential or otherwise, he didn't draw himself up to his full height and, glancing from one teleprompter to another, declare righteously that the lascivious exploitation of airhead interns was actually a national obsession about which the American people must have a full and frank dialog. Nor did he add "Why, I remember cringing in a strangely excited kind of way when my grandpappy - God bless his salacious heart - on a number of occasions made some off color remarks about Betty Sue with those fine melons from out Shady Creek way."

This sleight of hand which attempts to palm off old Ma Dunham's peccadilloes as the moral equivalent and political quid pro quo of Reverend Wright's hate-filled rants is all of a piece with the rest of Obama's speech. It was a skillfully crafted oration though delivered in a strange low-key manner without any of the panache, power and vocal subtleties of his previous set-pieces. The audience was subdued and sombre, altogether different from the passionate worshipful crowds off of which he normally plays with such spellbinding virtuosity. His performance had a stilted, tentative quality about it, as if he were an expert pathologist forced by a wretched circumstance to autopsy the violated corpse of a love one. There was about him a certain sad distaste coupled with a bitter determination to see the business through to the end as best he could.

The matter of the speech was like a trompe d'oeil which glanced from a distance convinces us of its reality but which on more careful observation proves itself to be a cleverly executed sham. Wright is declared a "crank" and his rabid views "repudiated" but Obama cannot "disown" him. Why ever not? Because he cannot "disown" the black community nor his wretchedly ill-used grandmother. Now a blood relative as a matter of biological reality cannot be "disowned" in any meaningful way. His grandmother will be forever his grandmother. He did not choose her nor he can void the connection. In any event it is he and he alone who dragged her by her chignon into this sorry saga for the very purpose of declaring his inability to be quit of her.

As for this fellow blacks why should he "disown" or in any way distance himself from them? Who suggested that or wants it? No one. Except perhaps the Senator himself in his earlier incarnation as a post-racial candidate whose complexion and physiognomy were regarded by him as mere genetic accidents. Blacks across the nation, he asserts, huddle around "the kitchen table" and mutter dark racially charged sentiments to each other that they are careful to keep hidden from their white compatriots. Such a charge in respect of 25 million citizens is outrageous but it also deliberately misses the point. If there are black people who parrot Jeremiah Wright's anti-American racist hate to each other, that's exactly what they're doing, parroting it. Wright in his pulpit is not simply a conduit for black racism he is one of its generators.

That ignorant and ill-educated African-Americans - for no one with any real knowledge can believe them - repeat the abominations of a respected pastor is unremarkable and in itself underlines the damage that Wright and his likes cause to all races in America but mostly to the very people he claims to be raising up. This also demonstrates the absolute necessity that Obama should feel for utterly cutting all ties with this man once and for all. Instead he lends his status and power to respectablizing a vile demagogue, repudiating some of the man's words - and what is a preacher but his words made flesh? - while clasping the man who utters them to his bosom. Can those credulous enough to be in thrall to the Reverend in the first place appreciate the nice distinction? Can anyone?

Under the guise of initiating a "national dialog" on race - an inane concept anyway being, as it is, a mere pious metaphor completely lacking any meaningful application in the real world - Obama invokes slavery and Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klanners and Alabama water fountains to tap into White Guilt, a never-to-be-depleted resource for Democratic hucksters to blind folk of all colors and none to the utter failure of their discredited "Great Society" bromides. He condemns Jeremiah Wright's view of America as "static" yet in the next breath justifies such radical disaffection among blacks as the inevitable result of the bad schools, poor health care and squalid crime-riddled neighborhoods to which the callous indifference of white America is still condemning them, this despite the gargantuan amount of treasure which Governments of both parties and all ideological hues have poured into myriad programs to tackle these very ills since that good ol' boy, LBJ, stetson waving, rode to the rescue way back in 1964.

In other words, by means of a breathtaking rhetorical "Ali shuffle", Obama, while ostensibly condemning his pastor, pulls off a 360 degree pivot and in fact endorses Wright's analysis of the American condition, sympathizes with the rage which this analysis generates and repudiates merely the form and expression which that analysis and rage are given in the notorious sermons. In effect he is saying that anti-Americanism and black racism are politically legitimate as long as their proponents don't actually foam at the mouth in public. He doesn't disown Wright because he fundamentally agrees with him!

The Obama campaign, the MoveOn.Organists and his worshipers in the MSM are spinning this sorry flim-flam of a speech like a top but to no avail. Barack Obama has lost his mojo and he ain't getting it back no how, no way.

He stood before us in Constitution Hall on Monday for all to see: just another cynical politician stuck in the mire using every trick he can think of to save just another cynical political career.